Category Archives: American Studies

Stovetop Solidarity: “Recipes for Semi-Starvation” and Antipoverty Organizing in American Cities

By Kimba Stahler

Flipping through recipe cards or a cookbook is not the apolitical exercise some might think. Whether picked by workers earning a fair wage in a safe environment or transported by truck drivers fighting for a better union contract, ingredients politicize meals.

Historically and recently, American consumer boycotts have moved the picket line to the checkout counter. Refusing to buy meat in 1935, Delano grapes in 1969, or Starbucks coffee in 2024 meant standing against high prices, labor rights violations, and corporations’ political machinations.

Ingredients contain another critical political dimension. Given food’s ability to gather, meal preparation and consumption are central to grassroots movements. One progressive student organization in the 1960s, the Students for a Democratic Society, devised a meal-time strategy in their “interracial movement of the poor.” From 1964 to 1966, that community organizing campaign established projects in fourteen Northern, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwestern cities. Full-time staff and summer volunteers organized locals while living in the same derelict housing as their constituents. But they didn’t just live locally: they ate locally too, serving similar dishes to the families who lived in these neighborhoods full-time. Over 500 white middle-class young people circulated and followed what they called “recipes for semi-starvation.” By adhering to welfare recipients’ budgets, they cooked up community and solidarity.

Community organizing and the “recipes for semi-starvation” brought together Americans who lived in two different societies. Many Students for a Democratic Society members grew up in the suburbs with access to pocket money and went on to college classes after finishing high school. Antioch College freshman Christopher Overs felt confident that summer organizing in Cleveland, twenty-five miles from his suburban home, would not jeopardize his fall tuition. Similarly, Elaine Lipshutz, a sophomore at Radcliffe College, could dedicate her school breaks to the Boston project, headquartered a twenty-five-minute walk from campus, rather than waged labor. Relocating these relatively short distances, Overs, Lipshutz, and hundreds of others entered another social world.

A summer organizing in inner cities introduced undergraduates to the estimated forty million impoverished Americans, a demographic hidden from their childhood neighborhoods. Living in derelict housing in Chicago, Cleveland, Newark, Boston, and other cities, they talked with their new neighbors, white and Black families that postwar affluence had left behind. Many were un- or underemployed men and single mothers receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children, a program referred to as welfare. In discussions of daily struggles, the white students offered possible political solutions and invitations to tenant councils, unemployment unions, and welfare rights meetings.

Charlotte Brooks, “Image from LOOK – Job 65-2559 titled Divorced mother,” 18 Oct. 1965. Photograph shows divorced single mother Vi Erker eating dinner with her son Gary, Saint Louis, Missouri. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress. https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ds.08295

Voluntarily enduring poverty, progressives built community bonds and signaled their commitment to ending economic injustice partly through food. Both short-term volunteers like Harpur College student Judith Bernstein and full-time staff such as University of Michigan alumnus Carol McEldowney reckoned with the disparity between middle-class and low-income plates. Breakfast sometimes consisted of a single egg or an ounce of corn flakes topped with reconstituted milk. Between community meetings, they stuffed day-old bread with liverwurst and lettuce. After a long day of door-knocking, they often sat down to a dinner of liver and onions, creamed chicken over biscuits, or split pea soup with a salad dressed simply with a mayonnaise and ketchup mixture.[1] Their menus and their tireless efforts persuaded some locals that they were sincere and reliable social justice activists.

Eating what their neighbors could afford, the students came face-to-face with the political implications of welfare. Poor families could rely on the social safety net established by the New Deal and the War on Poverty. As countless learned firsthand, however, financial and material assistance programs afforded a bare minimum, placing countless commodities out of reach. The Cleveland project whittled their daily food allowance to forty-three cents per person, replicating the budget welfare programs provided.[2] Features of middle-class tables, like orange juice, were far too costly. “Don’t buy it unless the group shows signs of scurvy,” project leaders instructed.[3]

Through the Students for a Democratic Society’s organizational and culinary efforts, they established and revived grassroots antipoverty organizations that helped a national movement for economic justice to flourish. Their efforts most fruitful efforts were with single mothers who received welfare. They assisted the Citizens United for Adequate Welfare in Cleveland and Mothers for Adequate Welfare in Boston, organizations that channeled numerous welfare recipient activists into the National Welfare Rights Organization. While organizing at the grassroots, Students for a Democratic Society leaders used cuisine to establish interpersonal and political relationships between the sons and daughters of postwar affluence and less fortunate Americans.

[1] Recipes for Semi-Starvation, n.d., box 29, folder 2, Students for a Democratic Society records, 1958-1970, Wisconsin Historical Society, Division of Library, Archives, and Museum Collections, Madison, Wisconsin (hereafter SDS records).

[2] Hugh to O and C, July 29, 1964, box 24, folder 5, SDS records.

[3] Recipes for Semi-Starvation, n.d., box 29, folder 1, SDS records.

 

Kimba Stahler is a Humanities Without Walls Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities Institute at Penn State University. She is a historian of US women’s and gender history and social justice movements. She specializes in twentieth century antipoverty and feminist movements. Her research interests include participatory democracy, alliance formation among grassroots activists and organizations, and identity politics. 

For Kimba’s dissertation research, she conducted oral histories to uncover how members of the Students for a Democratic Society living in Cleveland constructed that organization’s most successful grassroots organizing campaign during the 1960s. Using those oral histories, she produced a story-telling podcast entitled “Visions of Democracy” that encourages listeners to think about the various forms that democratic participation takes. Her current book project, tentatively titled Rats in Common: The Untold History of Cleveland’s Interracial Welfare Rights Movement, explores how white middle-class political organizers and poor white and Black single mothers forged productive political relationships out of their shared commitment to radical forms of American democracy. 

 

In Search of Meat Substitute Recipes in Historical U.S. Community Cookbooks

By Jennifer “JJ” Harbster
The Library of Congress has been collecting U.S. community cookbooks since the copyright deposit of  one of the country’s first community cookbooks, Maria Moss’s 1864 “Poetical Cook Book”  which raised funds for wounded Civil War soldiers. What has amassed since are thousands of titles that represent more than a century of U.S. food trends, eating habits, food systems, and responses to historical events.

One such food trend are meatless meals. Meat substitutes appear in U.S. community cookbooks at the turn of the 20th century for a variety of reasons, including economics, patriotic duties, and nutritional concerns, as well as religious and ethical practices. These early alternative meat substitutes were homemade, using ingredients that were easily attainable, such as nuts and legumes. Occasionally, statements on reasons for including meat substitutes were featured with the recipes, which provide historical context.

Preface to the World War I community cookbook “Twentieth Century Club War Time Cook Book,” Pittsburg, PA, 1918.

Using the Library of Congress digital community cookbook collection, I went on a search of early meat substitute recipes, focusing on cookbooks published from the 1890s through World War I.  This time range was selected to coincide with the rise in vegetarianism in the U.S and the food (diet) reform movements of Sylvester Graham and the Kellogg Brothers, as well as the promotion of meat substitute recipes during WWI.

Place is an important filter when surveying community cookbooks, and so I focused my attention on Chicago since a series of lectures on vegetarianism was given at the 1893 Columbian Exposition that influenced a wave of vegetarian organizations and business in the city.  To broaden my search, I included titles by state: Illinois, Pennsylvania, New York, and Michigan. Lastly, I was already familiar with the “Meals Without Meat” chapter (pgs. 371-390) written by Mrs. Antoinette “Nettie” Harris, a vegetarian, in the 1903 “Raisin Center Cook Book” from Fowler, California, and so I wanted to see if I could discover additional vegetarian voices in titles from California.

Vegetarian Thanksgiving Menu from “The Raisin Center Cook Book,” Fowler, CA, 1903.

Searching for meat substitute recipes in historical community cookbooks requires the use of a variety of terms such as meatless or meat-less, meat substitute, substitutes for meat, mock, and even sham (see for example the recipe for Sham Oysters in “Inglenook Cook Book,” p. 139). I discovered that the use of mock can be problematic since the term is more often applied to an alternative meat to use in a recipe, such as Mock Turtle Soup recipes that call for calf liver. However, mock can be used to describe a meat alternative recipe, such as a Mock Turtle Soup recipe from the “Monmouth Baptists Ladies Cookbook” (Illinois, 1907) that uses black beans instead of meat (p.15), so searching for mock recipes should not be avoided.

Altogether, I reviewed 50 titles and did not find as many meat substitute recipes as I had hoped. I did discover a curious pattern of plant substitute recipes for oysters throughout the early 20th century titles. For example, the “North End Club Cook Book” (Chicago, 1905) featured Mock Fried Oysters (p.31) and Mock Oysters (p. 35). One of the most common substitutes for oyster was salsify, also known as oyster plant or vegetable oyster, a plant that is not native to North America and is said to taste like oyster when cooked. Also worth mentioning is the use of celery as oyster substitute such as Mock Escalloped Oysters (p. 66) from “Monmouth Baptists Ladies Cookbook” that makes “a delicious dinner dish and resembles escalloped oysters.” It is possible that these occurrences of oyster plant or celery substitutes were a direct result of overfishing practices which depleted oyster populations along the east coast of the United States by the early 20th century.

Illustration of Salsify in “Grocer’s Encyclopedia” compiled by Artemas Ward, 1911: 447.

As one would expect, the WWI community cookbooks were a treasure trove of creative meat substitute recipes. “Twentieth Century Club War Time Cook Book” (Pittsburgh, PA, 1918 ) included its meat substitute recipes with their chapter on meats (pgs. 44-52). The recipes were highly creative and included names such as Liberty Meat (p.44) and Camouflage Roast (p.45); as well as meatless substitute recipes for common foods such as Mock Sausage (p.47) and a Nut Scrapple (p.49). “Conservation Recipes” (Berkeley, CA, 1918) featured a chapter on meat substitutes (pgs. 62-75) that recommended the use of “dried beans, peas, some nuts, milk, eggs, and cheese” (p. 62). A couple of creative examples featured were a Mock Veal Roast that used lentils and peanuts (p. 69) and a Vegetable Roast that used soybeans (p. 70).

Liberty Meat recipe from “Twentieth Century Club War Time Cook Book,” Pittsburgh, PA, 1918.

Chicago community cookbooks proved to yield the most success in my search for meat substitute recipes.  There were also some unexpected finds such as a recipe for granula (sic), a “hygienic food” (“Inglenook Cook Book,” Elgin, IL, p. 93), and a mock smelt recipe  (“The Housekeepers’ Friend,” Chicago, 1891, p. 33) that boasts “This is a fish dish, that is not fish at all.” Further explorations of meat substitute recipes in historical community cookbooks would include a larger pool of Chicago and Illinois titles to gain a deeper understanding of the influence of vegetarianism and use of meat substitute recipes  in these Midwestern communities.  The historical presence of these plant-based alternatives challenges the stereotype of the Midwestern diet as a strictly sturdy meat-and-potatoes affair.

Jennifer “JJ” Harbster is the head of the Library of Congress Science Section. In this capacity she works with an amazing group of librarians who develop science collections, provide reference services, and create research products and programs. She is also the Library’s culinary specialist since cooking/baking is a science, and cookbooks are classed as a technology, which fall under her section’s purview. She delights in spending time with the Library’s cookbook collection. For her, cookbooks are so much more than a list of recipes. They are stories, histories, and documents of eating habits, food systems, and people.

Community Cookbooks as Mapping Resources

By Suzanne Zoe Joskow 
When I began building The Community Cookbook Archive — made up of over four hundred Los Angeles-based collective recipe books, spanning three centuries — I was struck by the books’ role in Southern California place-making. The majority of community cookbooks are self-published, which means the included recipes are not from professional chefs. Instead, the entries reflect how contributors, usually women, cooked and ate at home. Indeed, notions of “home” are foundational to these books – from recipes evoking the flavors of a childhood far away to those anchored in native ingredients. Community cookbooks are absolutely records of place.

In the most literal sense, it is not uncommon for community cookbooks to include actual maps. The Westchester Directory and Culinary Art community cookbook, published 1950, opens with a map of the area, followed by hand-written recipes from residents within LA’s Westchester neighborhood. Visible towards the top of the map (image below) one can see the land that was, at that time, Howard Hughes’ personal airfield, now Playa Vista. 

Interior map and cover from Westchester Directory and Culinary Art (1950). Image courtesy of the author.
Interior map and cover from Westchester Directory and Culinary Art (1950). Image courtesy of the author.

Beyond maps, many community cookbooks, especially older ones, contain both the names of the recipe contributors and also their home addresses. In some instances, it may be the only time this directory information ever appeared in print — even in phone books, which often listed only a household’s men, or in census data, due to systemic undercounting of certain demographics.

One example of an early Los Angeles cookbook that features contributor addresses is The Federation Cook Book. The book was compiled and published in 1911 by Bertha L. Turner, on behalf of the California State Federation of Colored Women. Turner was a sought-after Pasadena caterer and philanthropist, who also served as a State Superintendent of Domestic Science. In the 1930s, she ran the Tea Room at the Hollywood Bowl. 

Cover of The Federation Cook Book (1911) and photo of Bertha L. Turner, from her obituary in the Pasadena Star-News, 1938. Image courtesy of the author.
Cover of The Federation Cook Book (1911) and photo of Bertha L. Turner, from her obituary in the Pasadena Star-News, 1938. Image courtesy of the author.

The Federation Cook Book is filled with recipes contributed by and, importantly, for Black women from throughout California. In her book, The Jemima Code, journalist Toni Tipton-Martin writes that the Federation Cookbook was one of the first books “that preserved the culinary values inherited and practiced by the black middle class.”

The cookbook also documents a uniquely Southern California history. While many of the included recipes come from across California, a significant number were contributed by women in Bertha L. Turner’s own Pasadena neighborhood. 

Because contributor addresses are included, I was able to plot many recipes from the book onto a present day map: 

Joskow’s West Pasadena map, plotting recipes, names, and addresses as they appear in The Federation Cook Book. Image courtesy of the author.
Joskow’s West Pasadena map, plotting recipes, names, and addresses as they appear in The Federation Cook Book. Image courtesy of the author.

Pasadena, especially South Pasadena, was infamous for its racist housing policies and covenants, so it is not surprising to find that the Black, mostly middle-class contributors to this book were clustered in Northwest Pasadena’s thriving Black community — where many early residents had come to LA in the late 1800s from the Jim Crow South. 

But one might immediately notice something else about the map: today the 210 freeway, which began construction in the 1950s, cuts right through these residences. In fact, I had to enlist an early 1900s map of Pasadena to make an address overlay on this present day one, because so many street names were changed, or eliminated. The majority of the Pasadena home addresses in The Federation Cook Book no longer exist. And yet, their kitchens are conjured by cooking from the book Turner compiled. 

As I leafed through other cookbooks in the Archive, I was intrigued to find Turner’s name in two additional books as well. One is an advertisement for Turner’s catering business in The Superior Cookbook (1927), put out by the Lamanda Park Woman’s Club. The other is the 1935 cookbook from the Pasadena Shakespeare Club, where Turner was a caterer. 

Covers of The Superior Cookbook and Dainties That Are Bred in a Book: Shakespeare Club Cook Book, from The Community Cookbook Archive. Image courtesy of the author.
Covers of The Superior Cookbook and Dainties That Are Bred in a Book: Shakespeare Club Cook Book, from The Community Cookbook Archive. Image courtesy of the author.

Seeing Ms. Turner’s name appear in books from both her primarily-Black neighborhood and her, often white, professional context, adds additional insight into the multitude of food worlds she moved between. In the 1927 Superior Cookbook, Turner’s advertisement included a new address, different from where the Federation Cookbook listed her in 1911. The Turners’ new purchase, at 725 Winona Avenue, was significant enough to gain coverage in the California Eagle, which described it as a “palatial residence”. 

I’ve added an approximation of this new address to the previous neighborhood map:

725 Winona Avenue, the residence of James and Bertha Turner, added to Joskow’s Pasadena map, and an advertisement for Turner’s catering business from The Superior Cookbook. Image courtesy of the author.
725 Winona Avenue, the residence of James and Bertha Turner, added to Joskow’s Pasadena map, and an advertisement for Turner’s catering business from The Superior Cookbook. Image courtesy of the author.

Unfortunately, Ms. Turner’s grand residence appears to have been demolished for freeway construction as well, and the address no longer exists. But it is remembered in the cookbooks she contributed to and supported.

Community cookbooks can be a meaningful mapping resource for scholars. However, they have rarely been treated as such and several books in the Community Cookbook Archive do not exist in library or institutional holdings. As with any primary source document, they are flawed and complex reflections of those who made them. But beyond recipes, the books capture granular, neighborhood histories, amidst ever changing city maps. As someone who studies place through the lens of food, I find these books to be an incredible gift. 

Suzanne Zoe Joskow has a BA in American Studies from Yale University and an MFA in Fine Art from Otis College of Art and Design. In her artwork and curatorial practice, Joskow focuses on the connection between physical material and social history — often in the form of maps or archives. Most recently, she is immersed in Los Angeles food history, exploring the ways Angelinos, particularly women, cooked at home. She has spoken about her work with a wide array of public audiences and media, including with The Los Angeles Times, NPR, KCRW’s Good Food, USC’s Archives Bazaar, and The Getty Museum’s ReCurrent Podcast. Joskow created and runs The Community Cookbook Archive, a growing, physical and digital collection of over 400 Los Angeles-based community cookbooks.

The Imagined, Implied, and Authentic Audiences of an American Settlement House Cookbook

By Kimberly S. Baker, PhD
In early 20th-century Milwaukee, a Midwestern American industrial city, social reformer Lizzie Kander and her fellow aid workers published a community cookbook (of sorts). Kander and colleagues ran “The Settlement,” a settlement house that supported and acclimated immigrant Jewish families to urban American living, offering social services, arts and culture opportunities, and classes including English and civics (Fritz). The Settlement Cookbook began as the instructional text for its cooking class for young women and girls. The settlement house movement generally held that adopting American ways of living included adopting American culinary habits (Ziegelman, 160); thus, settlement-style cooking classes introduced immigrants to mainstream American food.

The Settlement Cookbook, 1901. (image credit: Wikimedia Commons).
The Settlement Cookbook, 1901. (image credit: Wikimedia Commons).

This cookbook and its historical and cultural context, audiences, and communicative goals introduce a “community” where imagined, implied, and authentic audiences converge. 

Settlement house initiatives can be understood as contact zones, “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power,” (Pratt, 1991). In these contact zones, people with social power and economic means strive to influence the lives of less-privileged people, and lower-status settlement house patrons receive services provided by higher-status workers, who themselves benefit, emotionally, culturally, and socially, from giving aid.

The uneven relationships present in settlement houses relies on forms of authoritative power which are also fundamental to advice literature, including household manuals, where higher-status authors instruct and make recommendations to their supposedly lower-status readers (Dorfman, 4). If authors write to advise an implied audience of their own peers, intending that authentic (lower-status) readers were “listening in” for guidance necessary to rise socially, group boundaries become more visible. Such advice is believed to be valuable because “correct” behavior indicates who belongs.

These were dynamics which Kander herself understood very well. Settlement “stood for domestic science;” she argued in The Settlement’s 1899 president’s report, and cooking class trained girls to “do battle with the industrialized world,” and, “equip [them] to become economical and efficient homemakers and intelligent Mothers.”(Annual Report, 1899). Precision and formality reflect the institutional authority of classroom texts and the then-emerging home-economics discipline with its scientific jargon. Cookbook instructions outline techniques, as well as specify cooking tools, brand-name ingredients, and prepared foods.

Cooking Class in 1907 (image credit: Encyclopedia of Milwaukee).
Cooking Class in 1907 (image credit: Encyclopedia of Milwaukee).
Measuring: Precise instruction in The Settlement’s cooking classes aligned with practices in the domestic science field (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).
Measuring: Precise instruction in The Settlement’s cooking classes aligned with practices in the domestic science field (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).

However, the Settlement’s authentic students were likely more experienced cooks than the start-with-the-basics instructions suggest. While Kander and her circle belonged to Reformed Jewish synagogues, the Settlement’s immigrant patrons followed more conservative religious practice, and kept Kosher (Fritz). The students’ kitchen skills were homegrown, as young Jewish girls learned religious food guidelines and traditional food preparation through helping their mothers (Ziegelman, 95-7). This oral tradition familiar to the immigrant students contrasts with the settlement house’s formal, institutional approach. Kander’s president’s report acknowledges these divergent norms, explaining that the cooking class was “obliged to conduct the lessons on the ‘Kosher’ plan—as the children adhered strictly to the orthodox rules of cooking,” (1899).

Rules of Kosher: Lessons on the “Kosher plan” at The Settlement’s cooking class accommodated its immigrant students (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).
Rules of Kosher: Lessons on the “Kosher plan” at The Settlement’s cooking class accommodated its immigrant students (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).

That cultural accommodation soon faded; Kander’s notes (1898) for the initial classroom cookbook address Kosher practices, including defining Kosher cooking, dishes for milk and meat meals, meat preparation, and washing (with soda, not soap, which contained “mixed materials”). In the 1903 printed edition, nods to Kosher practices are minimal; non-compliant recipes such as for shellfish, and meat with dairy, feature among its pages. This cookbook content aligned with the non-Kosher eating habits of the local, middle-class, German, Reformed-Jewish community, rather than the settlement house students.

Milk Meals: Lizzie Kander’s notebook with plans for the “Kosher plan” lessons for The Settlement’s cooking class (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).
Milk Meals: Lizzie Kander’s notebook with plans for the “Kosher plan” lessons for The Settlement’s cooking class (courtesy: Lizzie Kander Papers).

In reflecting the broader local community, the cookbook not only gains potential readers, but also legitimacy by association with them. Community authority (and approval) offers students a permission structure to discard strict, traditional norms and adopt American cuisine.

That affluent, German-Jewish community was also a key cookbook audience, supporting The Settlement and funding the cookbook itself: Kander initially sought to publish the recipes for classroom efficiency, so students could spend class time cooking, not copying. The Settlement’s all-male directors denied this funding request as extravagant, so the women and their publisher instead sold advertisements in the cookbook, many to businesses owned by Kander’s social peers. Students bought copies for a reduced fee; a local department store sold surplus cookbooks to the public. The initial 1901 print run sold out within the year, and proceeds from subsequent editions, edited by Kander herself, funded The Settlement through its first nine years (Fritz). 

The cookbook’s advertising sections showcased luxury goods and services that reinforced the sophisticated, middle-class living invoked by the recipes. While the lifestyle advertised was likely unattainable for the immigrant student audience, the women whose families owned the businesses that purchased ads were more realistic customers. The ads may also have reinforced the ad buyers’ altruism by publicizing who else bought ads and supported the cause.

The cookbook may appear a rhetorical flop, delivering strict, novice-level instruction to knowledgeable students, proscribing a cuisine that challenges students’ religious norms, and advertising an unattainable lifestyle. Instructors with social status and wealth advised newcomers that being American meant following these guidelines. Yet, despite apparent shortcomings of audience analysis, the cookbook remained popular, locally, and nationally, for decades, blending tradition with American tastes and the changing times.

REFERENCES:

Dorfman, Cindy. “The Garden of Eating: The Carnal Kitchen in Contemporary American Culture.” Feminist Issues 12.1 (1992): 21-38.

Fritz, Angela. “Lizzie Black Kander & Culinary Reform in Milwaukee 1880-1920.” The Wisconsin Magazine of History (2004): 36-49. 

Kander, Mrs. Simon. and Mrs. Henry Schoenfeld. The Settlement Cookbook.  Milwaukee: The Settlement. 1903. Carlisle, MA: Applewood Books. 2010.

— Annual Report: Milwaukee Jewish Mission. June 6, 1899. MS. Lizzie Black Kander Papers, 1875-1960 (Box 2 Folder 11) Housed at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries’ Archives Department / Milwaukee Area Research Center; owned by the Wisconsin Historical Society, Division of Library, Archives, and Museum Collections. Milwaukee, WI. 15 June, 2016.

—-Notebook. “Cooking Lesson Book.” 1898. MS. Lizzie Black Kander Papers, 1875-1960 (Box 1 Folder 10) Housed at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries’ Archives Department / Milwaukee Area Research Center; owned by the Wisconsin Historical Society, Division of Library, Archives, and Museum Collections. Milwaukee, WI. 15 June, 2016.

Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession (1991): 33-40.

Ziegelman, J. 97 Orchard: An edible history of five immigrant families in one New York tenement. Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins. 2010.


Dr. Kimberly Baker is an instructor in the Humanities, Social Science and Communication department at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, in Milwaukee, WI, where she teaches courses in professional and technical communication. Her research interests include The Settlement Cookbook, and its author, social reformer Lizzie Black Kander, as well as workplace communication and the experience of user-experience (UX) professionals in organizations. She is at work on a co-authored book about everyday rhetoric for undergraduate STEM students.